Posh and highly exclusive nature-lovers' resort in the northeastern deserts of the wealthy province of Narrowvale. Intentionally cultivated in wasteland surroundings for the sake of constructs contrast, the Garden is the brainchild of elven princess-turned-druid Windsong Silvergreen, whose experience with the wealthy aristocracy of humanity has led her to believe that the surest way to improve the lot of Nature in the modern world is to create a place like this, where the wild is presented as a source of verdant luxury and blessed sanctuary from the outside world. (Similar logic underlay her long succession of diplomatic marriages to human viscounts and dukes, all of which had as their explicit primary motive the improvement of elf-human relations, and none of which succeeded, a pattern she refuses to recognize and sees as having no bearing on the current experiment.) The Garden has existed for nearly three hundred years, and Windsong herself is approaching the limit of elven lifespan; rooted in the elvish variety of conservativism, she has never really gotten used to the Imperial way of doing business, having grown up in an age when the combined elf kingdoms (drow excluded, of course) were four times bigger than the Empire, instead of four times smaller as they are now. While undeniably attractive, just as she is, the Garden is similarly beginning to crack under the strain of its age, and puts far too much effort into preserving a flawless appearance.

(Amusing typo there, where the strikeout is. Wonder if I should put some extra Golems here because of it. Then again, I've found two other such errors which aren't worthy of such note, correcting one that involved a duplicate word, and leaving the other intact as a less-than-ideal turn of phrase rather than continue fiddling with it.)

Last edited by willpell on Mon Jul 16, 2018 5:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Jungle-reclaimed temple complex in the depths of East Cycadria near the Pan Angh border, a massive pyramid made of sandstone so golden-hued that legend attributes the site with being made entirely out of precious metals (if not gold per se, then at least orichalcum or highly refined brass). Possibly guarded by metallic dragons.

Whiteleaf's loose equivalent of Castle Greyhawk or the Ruins of Undermountain, this complex differs from those locations in being primarily aboveground, built horizontally rather than vertically, filling a broad river valley in a Hinterlands region which remains largely untouched despite lying close to even the borders of the original Empire. Civilization has largely spread around this area without encroaching into it; the presence of exceedingly dangerous magical beasts, who lair in the Labyrinth but find ways of marauding out into the surrounding countryside, provides a strong incentive to avoid poking the bear. Interestingly, the megalomaniacal archmage Tsoldur, who created the Labyrinth to hold his blasphemous experiments, is believed to have since ascended to the Celestine Host and become the "guardian angel" of his own former headquarters, charged with keeping the more dangerous of his experiments in check and overseeing the activities of anyone who intrudes into the maze; certainly, if this is true, he makes no guarantees that adventurers delving into the area will return alive, but perhaps matters would be far worse without his influence. Also unlike Greyhawk and Undermountain, the Labyrinth has attracted relatively little attention, perhaps because the tales of it place more emphasis on danger and less on treasure; to date, no economy has sprung up around the efforts of sporadic dungeon-delvers to penetrate the maze's secrets.

Modest but radical gynocratic regime adjacent to Tamsin, whose denizens are more militant about their fear of magic, relying on their "intuition" instead of on divine inspiration to channel the combative arts they practice. Disdaining the sword as a masculine symbol, mostly due to the Tamsini cultural fetish for blades, the Lhazauri rely primarily on hammers and polearms in combat, assiduously avoiding both spears and battleaxes entirely, while considering the staff or club as a last resort.

A wide cobblestoned thoroughfare which cuts across a "sensuously curved" landscape in the back country of a province near Heather Planes, infamously dotted with "performing houses", temples, monasteries and "health resorts" which are all ultimately little more than brothels. While the prostitution was never explicitly legal in this region, both the current provincial government and the preceding feudal kingdom were openly tolerant of this underground flesh trade, and activists throughout the rest of the Empire still consider this architectural masterpiece of the ancient world to be an embarrassing symbol of exploitation (though sources vary on whether the sexual exploitation of women is a greater or lesser part of the equation than the financial exploitation of men).

Coastal city in the Imperial "old country", famous for the use of elephants as draft animals, many of which are painted in the province's three colored stripes. The primary exporter of white chocolate to the rest of the world; cash from this wildly profitable industry has made the port one of the Empires' richest municipalities, with a burgeoning textile industry producing huge reams of cloth dyed into two colors and then having them manufactured into gender-specific clothing. The city's men occasionally complain that their purple trousers and shirts don't match one of the red, white, and green bars of the flag, while women's traditional skirts and braziers are informed by their historical role as nature-priestesses in the area's pagan faith (since merged into the continent-wide Druidic orders and desegregated).

Is the headquarters of the wildly unconventional Obedients-cleric Antha Rhyccardhi, and was infamously terrorized by the legendary leviathan By-Cha, from whose name the word "beach" is said to originate.

The globe-circling "deep" ocean which surrounds the single large continent of Terrestra and its handful of adjoining islands; distinguished from the Inland Sound and the Peaceful Sea, Panthalassa is seldom trafficked by even the bravest of sea voyagers, and the aquatic races shun large stretches of it as an isolated wasteland (occasionally romanticizing it as the "last frontier", but more often shunning it as containing nothing of sufficient value to justify facing its dangers). Those beings which do survive here are mostly highly antisocial types such as krakens and shark-men, and the shortage of adequate food and other comforts make them even more vicious than their nature would suggest. Influence from the Lower Planes is fairly common in this region, and those who have contact with the Celestial Host are likely to suspect them of having abandoned these sparsely-populated areas, although it is possible that they instead actively wish to keep them uninhabited, and are simply lax in disciplining those who break that rule.

This province is named after a wooded region within it, where the roots of the great trees reach so deep that they intertwine with seismic faults; though it is an exaggeration to say that these roots actually hold the continent together, they do play a significant role in keeping the area geologically stable. Furthermore, the trees are semi-aware, and have exceedingly high psychic sensitivity, so that they react to violence and destruction by emitting psionic shockwaves into the earth, producing powerful tremors. For this reason, the area is a refuge for pacifists, and plays host to all manner of interesting characters who wish to take advantage of the local culture of nonviolence.

(This hastily-written snippet requires expansion, I'm mostly just trying to get the ball rolling on the Whiteleaf project again.)

The more reputable of two public houses visible from the main street of Camlon, distinguished by a better overall state of repair from its rival establishment, "A Real Kick in the Pants". (These are by no means the only such businesses in the thriving old town of thousands; at least a dozen assorted alehouses, hostels, performance venues, and general-purpose dives are scattered about, but do not advertise in order to keep boorish tourists out of their clientele.) Ratleigh's bears the sign of a coiled snake, an animal viewed positively by the elves who provide much of the upscale patronage the business owners wish to cultivate. Is perhaps the only bar in the whole Empire to have a bouncer, an apelike but surprisingly intelligent fellow with a blond ponytail by the name of Dixon King, who unbeknownst to the ruffians he turns away spends much of his shift daydreaming, wishing he could fly and imagining grand adventures where he battles a tribe of pirate lizardmen in order to reclaim his golden hoard.

This Drow cave-city is home to a bold experiment in Evil, which the gods and exemplars of Good are watching with intense curiosity (and horror, nausea, and grief, a particularly intense blend of the emotions they feel whenever they are forced to tolerate Evil's existence for various reasons). A charismatic leader has arisen from within the primarily-male military forces which secure the borders of every dark elf enclave; usually the generals and marshals of these legions are kept thoroughly suborned by female clerics and House Matrons, and the few who shake their programming are quickly singled out and disposed of, but in this case, a coup recently succeeded which has isolated the former Cavern of the Writhing Veil from its neighbors, while also destroying much of the female power structure within the burstingly-overpopulated metropolis. Already far from the authority centers of the primary church and the most influential trans-cavern houses, this settlement has had its population decimated (literally, casualties of almost exactly 10.000% have been carefully documented, as one of the most important tasks females are allowed to assist with anymore), and with nothing to stabilize the existing power structure, the erstwhile minor captain of an erstwhile minor regiment has suddenly declared himself "Emperor of the Drow" (it is unclear whether he got the loanword from humans and simply translated it, or if the term is a revival of obsolete Elvish terminology far predating the descent of the duaral's ancestors into the Underdark). Obviously, there are numerous opponents to his claim, but his skill in thwarting assassins, poisoners, hypnotists, muckrakers, and all manner of other foes has begun to assert itself. Diviners in other caverns have yet to learn of the extent to which this plot has succeeded, possibly due to clandestine assistance from agents of Good (though such interference in a notoriously paranoid and unstable regime is dangerous; most sensible affiliations simply try to minimize the collateral damage that will surround such a disastrous social transformation), but it's only a matter of time...however, even the threat of a nascent patriarchy may not be enough to unify the eternally-treacherous Drow long enough to marshal a sufficiently fierce counter-insurgency.

District of the City of Doors dedicated to the hospitality of dragon-shaped planar visitors, of all sizes, alignments, and environmental preferences. The local architecture is largely designed to resemble those natural habitats typically preferred by dragonkind (mountains, jungles, swampy coastlines, and dry hills), ingeniously mixing artifice with landscaping, in order to ensure comfort for the dragons and limited accessibility for humanoids interested in trafficking with them. A high density of magic shops with a specialization in adjusting relics for quadrupedal wear, an extraordinarily baroque delivery-restaurant industry catering to the draconic palate, and a discrete interspecies red-light district are among the amenities of this neighborhood, whose security concerns are attended to with substantial vigor by Harmonium troops under strict oath.

Founding province of the Imperium, close to the HPA border, where local custom dictates that all villages or towns are referred to as Garths in the regional dialect. The largest and most widely-known, though not the provincial capital, is the bustling seaport of Garth Feydre, whose primary industry is the manufacture of impractically oversized warships for the Empire navy. These massive carracks are mostly drydocked along the coast of the Inland Sound, as it is too expensive to keep them crewed and repaired, given the lack of a need for such military firepower in the Empire's long-standing state of peace. However, the presence of influential merchant guilds in Feydre, which derive tremendous profit from the manufacture of the ships, ensures that they are still being cranked out at a continuous pace, employing a huge percentage of the Ennisbrook population in continuing to stock the Empire's armada with more weaponry than they will ever need.

One of the Sixteen Schools which are responsible for most of the magical instruction throughout the Empire (and virtually all of that of ranking Imperial mage-officers), the current Varsity is a fairly conventional wizards' academy today, but its history is interesting, as it was originally founded as a "scientific" collaborative (hence the term "witship", one of several words that Whiteleaf's people have invented over the years while groping to discover the concept of "science"; the word is in occasional use, but most Imperial citizens wouldn't recognize it). One of a handful of efforts over recent centuries at promoting "natural philosophy" as a serious field of inquiry, in spite of the near-impossibility of using the "scientific method" in a world where the forces of magic keep reality's inner workings pretty much fundamentally unknowable, the original Witship college quickly ran out of funding, and the facility was sold to the Mage-Queen Vallara Varan (a colleague of Magister Lenson, Levin Thundertongue, and other founders of the initial Eight Schools), who transformed it into one of the first contemporaries of those institutions.

Formally known, to its secret hobgoblin caretakers, as Krazh-nakh Jel'Prahm Zhanat'kheng Schulp Zedakh, the "Magnificent Proving-Chambers Labyrinth of the Archaic Recumbent-Combatant Syphon", the Dungeon of Suck began as a gradual rumor percolating through the various adventuring guilds of Whiteleaf, but enough stories have been compared, contrasted, and corroborated with each other than the Dungeon's existence is now considered a fact, even though its exact location and nature remain shrouded in mystery (roughly the equivalent of Groom Lake Air Force Base, aka Area 51, in modern American conspiracy theory - the fact of its existence in some form is tangibly known, but speculation runs rampant as to the details, and far more is suspected than can be considered credible). Built around the titular Syphon, an ancient artifact with the power to abduct sleeping creatures from anywhere on Terrestra and then return them to their point of origin, transporting them through the Dream Realm and thus fogging their memories of the experience until it is often dismissed as a confusing nightmare, the complex has gained its nickname among its dungeoneer victims and their associates, by virtue of its seeming lack of the type of thematic integrity which a professional delver expects to find among ruins, tombs, lairs, and other "adventure sites". Apparently composed primarily of featureless 10-by-10 rooms connected by a door in each side, with improbably flat ceilings that suggest it may not be as far underground as most such warrens (an actual dungeon generally requires vaulted overhead surfaces to distribute the weight of hundreds of feet of earth, and only particularly clever workmanship or magic can obviate this need), very few of which are trapped, furnished, or otherwise seem either "lived in" or long-abandoned, the Dungeon of Suck seems like a very uninspired design, if it deserves to be called a "design" at all...and that's just the way its masters want it.

Overseen personally by Permanent Undersecretary Thar'zhan of the Glorious Hobgoblin Military Intelligence Legion, the Proving-Chambers Labyrinth is used to gather data on the combat performance of entities living in rival nations, so that the Hatchet Kingdom can assess the performance of its own soldiers as well as monitoring potential enemies. The Archaic Syphon grabs random warriors from anywhere in the world, selecting any creature which might be "vaguely interesting" according to its vague parameters (both noncombatants and individuals of high importance on the global scale are generally excluded as a result, though exceptions happen occasionally for no clear reason); dumping these persons as well as various monsters into one or another chamber, and then tracking them to be returned to their original environment later, the Syphon is watched like a hawk by hoblin clerks of the Continuous War Preparation Department, using specially-engineered scrying devices which even wizards (although these are far less frequently grabbed by the Syphon than other, less hyper-capable combatants) cannot track back to the deeply-buried command center which contains the Syphon itself. Hobgoblin warriors abound within the Chambers themselves, although they make a point to pretend they are just more randomly selected victims of whatever mysterious power brings creatures to the Dungeon; they are seldom suspected of their role, and are generally viewed somewhat more favorably than the other "random encounters" by visiting adventurers, in light of their habitually "sporting" behavior towards those they fight. Encountered kidnappees are often presented with weapons, healing, and even a modicum of useful information (though never anything that would help them figure out the "big picture" of what's going on, just tips on a particular nearby monster which the patrol could plausibly claim to have actually encountered while wandering through the complex), which the soldiers pretend they are doing out of camaraderie for fellow "prisoners" and/or a desire for a "fair fight"; the actual objective, of course, is to gain more useful testing statistics, and anyone who seems to be getting too concrete an idea of what is going on will be attacked, led into an ambush, sent back immediately, or guided on various wild-goose chases, whichever is estimated to best befuddle the individual in question. A staggering number of files have been gathered through these investigations over the half-decade that the Proving Chambers have been operational; should anyone learn the truth of the Labyrinth and manage to get into the command center, they would have quite a wealth of knowledge at their disposal, although the exceedingly paranoid Hatchet leadership will destroy the entire Dungeon if they even begin to suspect that its security has been compromised by any of their potential enemies.

Massive ruined tower structure underneath the Alder Bole, the ancient white tree at the exact central point of the Transylvaine Wilderness Refuge, headquarters of the Greenswarden druidic collective. The Pharos is believed to have been an arcology for a sect of demon worshippers, and may be the receptacle of a living wood longsword with a long and storied history.

Located in the Quatrinate Hegemony's metropolis-sized capital, this magnificent edifice is the headquarters of the Quatrinate House Fassaud (within the Cosmari Clade), and also the largest worldwide sacred site of the church of the Faceless, the deity of deception and pretense (loosely equivalent to the Forgotten Realms god known only as Mask, though more specifically related to shapeshifting and lacking the Thievery portfolio). House Fassaud consists of persons who are the descendants of mating between humans and doppelgangers - these are identical in broad mechanics to the Changelings described in the Eberron Campaign Setting (though they do not conform to the extended cultural description presented in Races of Eberron); these men and women, or at least their distant ancestors, grew up believing they were in fact humans, either within the Tradespeak Empire or various other nations (some no longer politically extant, having been absorbed by the Empire, Cycadria, Radvidva, or other expansionist powers that were themselves absorbed later). At some point in their youth, they began to discover that their identity was fluid, in a way that was impossible for any actual human, and shortly thereafter they were contacted by the doppelgangers or their agents, informed in no uncertain terms that they belonged to the Hegemonic Houses, and were swiftly relocated with or without their consent. By now the vast majority of doppelganger bloodlines have been shepherded into Hegemony territory - bringing no shortage of intelligence about their home countries, which is likely part of the purpose of the shapeshifters' breeding in the human nations in the first place.

The Palace of Masks is an architectural marvel, though its interior layout tells a very different story than its decor; the House's scions have a strongly-developed flair for pageantry and theatrics, and they constantly renovate and redecorate the edifice in a mixture of styles from across the world, some ultra-modern or even anachronistically forward-thinking, others resurrected from centuries-lost civilizations or simply bygone ages within the current paradigm. These constant quick-changes are overseen by a triumvirate of leaders who rule the entire Hegemony-wide House; the Patron and Matron in the usual sense of Hegemonic houses insist upon calling themselves the "King of All Mankind" and the "Queen Among Wymyn", and though they are formally in charge, they ultimately both take their marching orders from the third ruler, an actual Doppelganger known only as the Apex of Gender Relations. Few individuals not belonging to the House have ever seen the Apex - it is spoken of quite freely, but in contexts which invariably lead outsiders to assume that the phrase describes an ideal or a state of mind, rather than a creature. Within the House, everybody knows that the Apex is an individual - and could be any individual - but they tend to believe what they are told, that the Apex is only an adviser who "bridges the authority" of the two half-human regnants.

Although changelings can assume the form of either sex at will, they generally avoid androgynous behavior when in their true form, and each one ostensibly answers to the authority of the King if their true form is male, and the Queen if they are female in actuality. However, the Apex's "guidance" of its two "mates" (exactly how consummated this political "partnership" is, nobody knows for sure) is truthfully quite impossible for them to disregard; the pretense is necessary, because the Hegemony's bylaws prohibit any House from being ruled by its nonhuman ancestor (the reason for this is obvious enough; nobody wants the infernally-blooded House Borgia to serve as a puppet state of Hell, giving the archdevil Asmoday de facto rulership of over a million people in one of the world's four most powerful nations), but in truth, no House in the Hegemony is more firmly under the thumb of its alien progenitor than Fassaud. Combine this with the fact that most Houses are descended from extraplanar Outsiders, rather than from anything as "ordinary" as a Monstrous Humanoid (dragon-blooded humanoids, for instance, are never welcome within the Hegemony), and the Fassaud are on very shaky legal grounds within their nation.

The webs of intrigue within the Palace of Masks consequently rival even the Web of Lies in their complexity, duplicity, and severability; it is thus an ideal location for a heavily political or "spycraft"-focused campaign. And the Faceless is one of the most ancient and pernicious villains of the Whiteleaf setting, whose technically non-Evil status helps it to operate with greater freedom than actual Fiends or gods of more overtly malicious concepts. This likely indicates a problem in the very definition of Evil for Whiteleaf purposes, which is an issue when the integrity of the cosmos is literally founded upon the reliable success of Good, in any competition with its opposite...because the conflict is defined largely in terms of Life and Death, a "villain" who seldom kills can operate with far greater freedom than one who develops a reputation for outright malice, and its sinister plans can go unopposed even by those incomprehensible forces (sometimes personified as the ACJUARS, but probably ultimately no more than "coincidence", "serendipity", or at most "teleology") which reliably ensure that a "hero" tends to "luckily" discover various Evil plots, and to arrive in the "nick of time" to thwart them, no matter how diligent the malefactors were in giving no hint of what they were up to. In any event, since the Faceless seems to be truly incomprehensible in its motives, never doing anything overtly antisocial enough to justify a global crusade against its trickery, it can drive the antagonism of a plot to an extent that true "villains" often cannot, frustrating some players but fascinating others. Combine this with the general fact that House Fassaud is a perfect symbol of what Whiteleaf stands for - an Eberron race serving a Forgotten Realm-esque god, within a nation best described as "Neutral Stupid" in an intentionally overcomplected way, all for the sake of presenting a puzzle that is nigh-impossible to cut through - and the Palace of Masks is a perfectly iconic location for a Whiteleaf campaign.